Discipline and pedagogy: diversities in lifelong learning

Miriam Zukas, University of Leeds, UK, and Janice Malcolm, University of Kent, UK

Paper presented at the 35th Annual SCUTREA Conference July 5-July 7 2005, University of Sussex, England, UK

Introduction

First adult education, and now lifelong learning, has expended a lot of energy in establishing and defending itself as a distinctive field of study and practice. As far as adult education is concerned, historically, this attempt has focused on the demarcation of adult education’s difference from other areas of education in terms of students, purposes and practices. This understandable assertion of identity has strongly supported the establishment of distinctive academic and policy apparatus such as organisations, institutes, journals, inspectorates and so on. However, exploration of the significance of disciplinary diversity to adult education has been somewhat neglected in favour of pursuit of the perceived common good, and it is this question of discipline and its implications for lifelong learning that we begin to address in this paper.

Pedagogic ascendancy in adult education

We situate our discussion in this paper primarily in higher education (HE) contexts. However, we believe that many of the issues, aside from those about research identities, are equally pertinent to the learning and skills sector (LSS), not least because the boundaries between the two sectors (HE and LSS) increasingly have more to do with financial and accountability arrangements than with institutions and levels. Both HE and LSS institutions now routinely offer provision which would traditionally have been found in the other sector. Some areas of overlap would once have been situated in departments of adult education in universities, local authority adult education or further education colleges: trade union studies, access to higher education, community outreach, return to learn programmes and so on. Whilst this may be something of an over-generalisation, what distinguished many of these shifting areas of overlap was their principal focus on adults, as distinct from other ‘target groups’, and the pedagogic assumptions about good ‘adult education’ which such programmes embodied.

It is noticeable that the primary focus on adults per se seems to have disappeared. Whilst we have argued collectively as adult educators that ours is a distinctive field of pedagogic practice, policy developments across post-compulsory education and training in the UK have increasingly come to emphasise the significance of discipline (rather than target group) for pedagogy. For example, teachers training for the learning and skills sector are now to be offered ‘mentoring to help teachers develop teaching skills in their own specialist or subject areas’ (p4, DfES, 2004, our emphasis); the Higher Education Academy supports discipline-based learning and teaching development through its various subject centres.

At the same time, and under a distinct policy apparatus, shifts in the assessment of research in universities have highlighted what appears to be a disjunction between discipline and adult education. Questions of the location and recognition of pedagogic research are still unresolved. In the 2001 British Research Assessment Exercise (RAE), disciplines made their own decisions about how such research was to be evaluated. For subject specialists working within adult education departments in higher education, the RAE issue raised profound and often painful questions of identity and belonging: were they to be submitted (i.e. recognised) with their ‘home’ discipline, or were they to be classified in some other way? And was adult education itself to be treated as a discipline in its own right, or to be seen as a subset of educational research? The issues have not disappeared. The current guidance for the next RAE due to take place in 2008 is that it will be up to each institution to decide whether pedagogic research within disciplines should be submitted to the education sub-panel or to discipline panels (RAE 2004, p 5). As for adult education, we are not convinced that its status even as a subset of educational research can be retained in the next RAE, leaving those who have focused on both adult education and discipline out on a limb.

The locations and changing allegiances of adult education in relation to disciplines are not administrative questions, but have far-reaching implications for the field of adult education/lifelong learning practice and research. There have previously been bursts of interest in the disciplinary basis for the study of adult education (Bright, 1989; Usher and Bryant, 1989; Usher and Edwards, 1994; Usher, Bryant and Johnston, 1997), and those arguments are clearly relevant to the discussion here. But the policy context has changed. As we have argued elsewhere (Malcolm and Zukas, 2005), contemporary policy and educational discourse in higher education rely on the artificial dichotomies between disciplinary and pedagogic identity, and between teaching and research as forms of knowledge production. In a world where adult education as a field of practice sometimes seems to have disappeared, adult educators need a clearer and more situated understanding of the significance of discipline in our work and identity.

Between pedagogy and discipline: the Leeds case

We write this paper at a time when one of the largest and best-known sites in the UK for both the study of adult education, and the provision of disciplinary-based programmes for adults in higher education, is about to disappear: the University of Leeds is closing its School of Continuing Education (where one of us is still located and the other worked until last year). This is of course a fate which met a number of other adult and continuing education departments during a round of ‘mainstreaming’ in the late 1980s and 1990s (see for example Armstrong and Miller, 1991, in particular the section on ‘Margins to mainstream: the position of continuing education in higher education’). As a partial replacement the University proposes to set up a new non-academic centre for lifelong learning, intended to provide ‘specialist nurturing and support’ for part-time and older students, and promote part-time degree programmes. Several academic staff are to be moved to the departments related to their ‘home’ discipline. The arguments behind this development are complex, but rest at least in part on questions about the location, ‘ownership’ and management of disciplines, academics and students within the University. In the case of academics, some of the arguments about location and ownership were couched in terms of ‘research management’: that is, research in a particular discipline should be embedded within that disciplinary department. At the same time, arguments were made for the distribution of adult education’s pedagogic expertise across the University: that is, those with adult education experience could become ‘champions’ for widening participation within disciplinary departments. The details of the proposed arrangements need not detain us here, and may in any case be horribly familiar to those who have been through similar reconstructions in the past. What we wish to explore is how adult educators’ disciplinary, research and pedagogic identities are played out under such arrangements.

In Leeds as elsewhere, academics are dispersed to ‘disciplinary’ departments only where those disciplinary departments will have them. The reasons for accepting individual academics or groups seem to depend on three factors which, from our perspective, are related, but from the perspective of departments are usually conceptualised as separate.

The first factor is the discipline or subject area to be transferred. Where individuals or teams bring ‘standard’ disciplinary expertise to a subject area, there may be concerns about ‘duplication’ and double-staffing. Where provision in related but adjacent disciplines can be transferred to a new departmental home, this may be seen as a coup: a chance to expand provision (rather than research) for existing and/or new students and perhaps to ‘grow’ the department. This enthusiasm for expansion is almost always associated with those disciplines Bernstein (2000) categorised as ‘regionals’ (interdisciplinary attempts involving a ‘regionalisation of knowledge’ that involves breaking down boundaries and ‘bringing things together’) rather than ‘singulars’ (disciplines with strongly classified discourses, seen as clearly demarcated from other disciplines). So those departments which, for example, have a focus on professional practice and a more catholic approach to disciplinary knowledge would tend to be more receptive to ‘adjacent’ subjects (e.g. healthcare studies), whilst others more secure in their disciplinary distinctiveness (e.g. politics) might not be so easily persuaded.

The second factor for some (but surprisingly, not all) departments, is the question of research area and profile, usually couched in terms of ‘Will this person be enterable in the next RAE?’ The definition of ‘enterable’ will depend on the department’s aspirations and status, and on the ‘fit’ between the individual’s research interests and the department’s broad ‘research mission’. Popular claims about the strong relationships between teaching and research may well be sidelined; adult educators’ particular pedagogic expertise may be disregarded as they are characterised merely as an additional ‘teaching resource’. However, a few departments recognise that a particular research expertise is linked explicitly or implicitly with the individual’s work with adults – for example, where a discipline has been ‘stretched’ in a new direction (for example, local and family history in the case of history, and particular sites and/or practices in the case of archaeology). In these cases, individuals may be expected to expand the existing undergraduate curriculum in terms of content, but it is rather less likely that they will be able to influence existing pedagogic approaches or to change the student profile. Such subjects are likely to be ‘singulars’, using Bernstein’s terms.

A final factor – rather less important than one might expect, given adult educators’ own identities and focus, as well as the current rhetoric about widening participation – is the consideration of the pedagogic expertise of individuals. In almost all cases, this recognition entails the ‘application’ of such knowledge, derived as it is from practice with adults, to particular groups of ‘struggling’ students (for example those finding chemistry difficult, or unfamiliar with some of the demands of academic writing). Predictably, this will usually apply to departments who struggle to recruit and retain undergraduates, or who have non-conventional routes into study – that is, the same departments which are likely to be motivated to consider widening participation as an important issue. For them the acquisition of adult educators may be seen as a possible solution to a pressing pedagogic problem.

Between pedagogy and discipline: changing places

Here we consider the cases of adult educators working in three disciplinary areas, and the ways in which their pedagogic and disciplinary identities have been constructed and reconstructed during this period of change. Our first case is that of one of our colleagues who works in the sciences, teaching ‘singulars’ within a discipline which might be viewed as a region. His many years of teaching science (with a basis in individual disciplines) to adults have demanded considerable creativity both on his part and the part of his students. His pedagogic identity and disciplinary approach are inseparable – his years of working with adult students have entailed a complete rethinking of the discipline itself as well as his approach to teaching (Zukas et al, 1996). Some of his adult students have been engaged in primary research, contributing to occasional publications where appropriate. He and his students were therefore clearly producing knowledge, if we take a social practice view of learning and understand knowing to be full participation in a community of practice (Lave and Wenger, 1991). In this case, the disciplinary department was keen to acquire what they perceived to be pedagogic expertise: the approaches to the discipline developed in order to teach adults (‘science by stealth’) worked much better than traditional approaches with recalcitrant standard-age undergraduates that no-one else wished or felt able to teach. Thus, the connections between disciplinary and pedagogic identity were critical in determining the future for this academic. We might also make the argument that the teaching undertaken by this particular individual was intermeshed with his research, providing a rich and complex example of the inseparability of teaching and research.

Our second case is someone who works in the area of creative arts (a region in Bernstein’s terms), with a long-established reputation as a practitioner, scholar and teacher. In her case, the relevant Faculty wanted to engage her in order to expand the subject in creative ways and to acquire specific pedagogic expertise. In terms of the subject, the individual’s skill in curriculum development was recognised. Adult educators take for granted the centrality of curriculum development – the very nature of the subject is transformed through an engagement with adult students, responding to student interests and producing new knowledge with students. The individual brought with her years of developing the curriculum in relation to the existing/potential student ‘market’ which has always been such a feature of adult education. However, the relationships between the development of the subject and the principal focus on adults were under-recognised, as has so often happened in the history of adult education. Instead, innovation and creativity were seen as a qualities of the individual concerned, without any apparent understanding of the ways in which curriculum knowledge is co-produced through the relations between teachers, students and discipline.

We suggested above that the individual’s value was also seen in terms of pedagogic expertise, in this case working with students who present particular challenges in relation to so-called traditional academic skills. Although the regional we are considering here recruits mainly standard-age students, members of the subject recognise that some aspects might best be taught in ways that privilege student experience, rather than disciplinary knowledge (if student experience and knowledge can be set against each other). In other words, there was a recognition that the foregrounding of educational processes and the nature of the learning and teaching which is so essential to adult education, is also useful in working with standard-age students who struggle with some academic conventions and practices. Hence, once more, the connections between disciplinary and pedagogic identity were critical.

But in this particular case, there was a third issue which contributed to the individual’s disciplinary and pedagogic expertise: the relationship between teaching and practice. Within the pedagogic literature of the creative art under discussion, it has been argued that one cannot teach without being an expert practitioner, and within adult education, there is certainly a view from students that this is the case. At a theoretical level, Bernstein also makes this link to practice: ‘Identities produced by the new (sic) regions are more likely to face outwards to fields of practice and thus their contents are more likely to be dependent on the requirements of these fields.’ (Bernstein, 2000, p 55). Within academe, the relationships between practice, discipline and knowledge production are, if anything, even more troublesome than those between teaching, discipline and knowledge production. One small example is the ongoing debate about how applied and practice-based research should be treated in the RAE (see RAE 2004, p 5 for extensive guidance). In this case, the practice focus has not been seen to be significant, even though it could be said to be at the heart of the development of the subject. Thus, the complex relationships between teaching and research have been marginalised.